What I’m going to share is very personal. I share with the wish that anyone else who has experienced anything close to what I’ve experienced may gain some hope, enlightenment, and clarity. I wish someone had done the same for me at a much younger age. I consider this my chance to help right the ship that has gone so incredibly wrong for many people who were raised in the same faith as I.

I was raised in the state of Utah in a devout Mormon family. My parents were married and remain so to this day. I was the last of four boys, the youngest by 7½ years. My family always went to church, based their actions and views of the world entirely on the beliefs held by the church, and from birth I was taught everything from this perspective. I was never taught anything other than what the church taught. It was never an option to not attend church. It was an obligation as much as going to school was.

I went along with it mainly due to fear. I feared punishment, being ostracized by family and friends, isolation, God’s wrath, being vulnerable, having to defend my position, among many other things. Over time, however, it became familiar and comfortable. Well, comfortable in the sense that it was the path of least resistance and it was known to me. I picture this akin to a prisoner who has forgotten what life is like in the outside world and feels most comfortable in prison because it’s familiar.

In the Mormon church everything is laid out for people’s lives. A sort of roadmap. If you’re not familiar with the Mormon church I will not go into detail, but suffice it to say that for boys, this includes obtaining the Priesthood and doing the related duties, being involved in Boy Scouts, preparing for and going on a full time 2 year mission, getting married in the temple, and living a very clean life as the church would define “clean.” This means no profanity, masturbation, pre-marital sexual activity of any kind, alcohol, rated-R movies or “mature” shows, aggressive or otherwise “dark” music, tattoos, smoking, coffee, tea, and implicitly no long hair or unkempt appearance in general (again, by the church’s definition of “unkempt”). It also means paying 10% of income to the church as tithing, wearing undergarments as dictated by the church, and dedicating two years to baptizing others in another part of the world into the church.

There wasn’t much opportunity for my mind to think about choices growing up, because the choices were already made for me. For me personally, this even went outside of church bounds and into my hobbies. I was more or less forced to play the piano (because this is a talent very admired within the Mormon faith) and although I very much disliked it, I didn’t really have much of a say. It was what I was supposed to do.

As I grew into my teenage years I began to fall into deep depression. I didn’t realize why at the time, but now it’s clear I had no feeling of empowerment, fulfillment, or control over my life. I wasn’t allowed to date a girl I really liked because she didn’t belong to my church. I had to sneak my cd’s around and listen to them in headphones because the music was too “dark” and “questionable.” My parents even got a hold of them at one point and decided to sell them all off without my consent after giving them each a listen and deciding they disapproved of my choices.

I didn’t do the fun things teenage boys do because I was always afraid of what the ramifications would be. I had no self-confidence and it came across in many social situations. I started self-medicating through pornography and when caught by my mother one day she brought in my dad to see what I had been viewing. I was shamed in a manner that no person should ever be subjected to. I was less than human. I felt so insignificant and small that it seemed as though I was not their son so much as I was a project that had gone terribly wrong. I was a rat in a cage who didn’t even realize I was in a cage, but knew I wanted out of something. I just didn’t know where the escape door was or even what to look for.

When it came time for me to prepare for my full time mission, I bit the bullet and started reading the Book of Mormon. I started reading and praying, and much to my surprise I started feeling good about it. So much so, that I would even say I found purpose in it and was excited to serve a mission.

I went on my mission to northern New Jersey and immediately came back down to earth. Despite my strongest efforts to be a clean cut missionary without faults, about a few weeks in I confessed to masturbation to my mission president. He proceeded to demean and humiliate me with comments such as “perhaps you should have never come out on a mission.” He mailed me a book written by a prior church President called “Miracle of Forgiveness” which my companion saw. Although he didn’t say, it was obvious he immediately knew why it had been sent to me. Further humiliation. It seemed to be an endless cycle, but par for the course. Again, I wasn’t a human. I was just a spiritual machine who malfunctioned time and time again. When it stops working or malfunctions, it gets told what a bad machine it is and that it should try harder to be what it was designed to be or else its maker will send punishment and the machine will not be happy.

I was a successful missionary as far as the church measures success. Which is, by the number of baptisms achieved. But I had been guilty of masturbation and pornography throughout my mission and came home with the shame and guilt associated with those things. My Dad later told me he didn’t see the “light” in my eyes when I came home like he has my brothers. He’s right, and it’s because I felt like a worthless human being.

I lived with my parents while going to college, not experiencing anything close to the typical college experience. I was a beaten down horse, and didn’t know how to be anything but what I was programmed to be. I wasn’t happy like I was when I felt I’d discovered the church was indeed true. I was miserable once again.

I should mention at this point that throughout my life I’d been building up questions about the church. Things that didn't make sense or just didn’t sit right with me. I’ve made a list below of the problems I had but kept suppressed in the name of faith that I simply didn’t know everything but God did.

• Why are little children as little as 2 or 3 forced to go up and profess a knowledge of truth they aren’t old enough to grasp, in front of an entire congregation?
• Why are children at the age of 8 allowed to be baptized, thereby allowing them (and really, coercing them) to make a life decision so impactful to their life when they are still 8 years away from being given the license to drive a car and further still to have even a small vote to determine the person who leads our country?
• If God is the same yesterday as today, why are no physically manifested miracles seen that are talked about so readily in scripture?
• Why were the blacks not granted the priesthood until the social pressures of the civil rights movement reached a breaking point so powerful that even the church couldn’t justify their restriction on blacks?
• Why are tea and coffee forbidden, while sugary sweets, drinks, and starches are not only common but encouraged in nearly every single church related activity?
• Why don’t the prophets and apostles prophesy about anything?
• Why does the church conduct business transactions and even build malls with funds donated by members?
• Why are there so few members of the church if it is the true church?
• Why is it essential to immerse oneself in water to achieve salvation? Does a person really not get into heaven if this arbitrary show of devotion isn’t done, no matter what good they have done in their life?
• Why are all the rituals necessary in general?
• Why was there such a long lag where the truth wasn’t on earth?
• Why are people punished because of what their ancestors did (i.e. Tower of Babel, The Great Apostasy, etc.)?
• How can the church believe the earth is ~6,000 years old?
• Why is God so violent in the Old Testament but so much more compassionate (relatively) in the New Testament? I thought he was the same yesterday and today.
• Why are there so many faiths and why is there so much confusion if God is a just God? Shouldn’t it be clear what the truth is to at least give people the chance to make the right decision?
• Why are God-guided, inspired decisions within the church so skewed towards the side of human weakness? (On my mission I didn’t see one single “inspired” decision with regards to leadership and companions, it was all clearly based on politics and connections).

I’m sure there are countless others I’ve missed, but it’s difficult to keep track of them all. Notice that these questions were not at all related to the credibility of the founders of the church or the events that led to the creation of the church. These were just common sense questions I had but never had answers to. Again, I just went on faith.

There is one other key question I’d considered many times but never really considered objectively, until November of 2013. I was reading a Facebook post by a high school friend’s older brother who I hadn’t spoken to in over a decade. He was challenging the idea of faith, stating that it is merely pretending to know something someone doesn’t really know. I commented, taking the church’s defense. In our back and forth conversation, he posed a question around the source of an answer to prayer. He asked how I know I received an answer to my prayer that the church was true. I stated it was because the answer isn’t what I expected or even wanted. He asked how God would communicate to someone, whether it would be via physical means or not. Given church doctrine states the Spirit is material, the answer had to be yes, that it would be via physical means. He then asked how I knew for certain that the physical reaction to my prayer was divine in nature. It didn’t hit me immediately, but through the next 24 hours I began to realize I didn’t know. I didn’t know at all. I started looking at things objectively for the first time in my life and realized that what I had felt was nothing more than my own emotion built out of my own mind. It’s the same kind of emotion that leads other people to belief their faith is correct. I knew within a day that what I had professed to believe my entire life was totally and completely fabricated and false.

What I didn’t see coming but experienced in full force, was the recollection of all the questions I’d ever had about the church. They scrolled through my mind like a Rolodex, and I was able to easily answer each one to complete satisfaction. To this day, the ease with which I was able to answer these questions both frustrates and amuses me. I felt a mix of emotions ranging from extreme relief, to extreme frustration and anger that I’d been misled all up to this point. All of the arbitrary guilt I’d felt about living life like a normal human being was immediately gone. The weight that lifted off my shoulders at that point could hold up the entire world. This was the beginning of a period of healing that I’m still going through and probably will through the rest of my life.

I also realized the error in logic of praying to know truth. Because ultimately, there is no possible way to get an answer in the negative direction. If you pray and don't get affirmation the church is true, it doesn't mean it's false - it only means you didn't pray sincerely enough or have a contrite enough heart. It's a trap door, and if you bang your head against it enough times it will get knocked open eventually and pull you inside. Other people in different faiths have the same prayer only about a different faith. And to nobody's surprise, they also get answers in the affirmative. This is impossible to reconcile.

It was only after this realization that I decided to investigate church history through the lens of someone outside the church. Unfiltered history is what I craved to know now that I knew it was all false. What I discovered shocked and appalled me. I learned Joseph Smith’s story changed over time, and was ultimately completely fabricated to the point that it didn’t reflect actual history at all. The fact is, he didn’t profess to see God until over a decade after the event was proclaimed to have occurred. And even then, his first story didn't mention Jesus Christ at all. He also didn’t translate using the urim and thummim, but rather a peep stone in a top hat. Martin Harris was a witness to the truth of many religions, not just Joseph Smith’s. Brigham Young’s “blood atonement” doctrine was the most shocking of it all when I learned of it. The comments he made in a public address explaining this doctrine are evil enough to compare him, in terms of principles and beliefs, to the vilest people that have ever walked the earth.

There is much more I learned about, such as the Kinderhook Plates, the well-established discrediting of the Book of Abraham, the many changes in the Book of Mormon, including the adjustment to account for Joseph Smith’s changing belief from the existence of a singular God to the Godhead of three persons, the polyandry of Joseph Smith, the implementation of correlation, the changing of the endowment and prior blood promises made which were eliminated, and so on. But all of this information only reaffirmed what I had come to realize through that simple Facebook conversation. None of it was a surprise, because I already knew it was false before learning about the deepest darkest secrets the church has hidden from its members.

It was shocking to see people’s reactions to my conclusion. In a stroke of irony, I felt I could relate to Joseph’s own history where he states he felt he was unfairly criticized and accused for merely stating the truth. I wasn’t a bad person, I wasn’t leaving the church because of offence or guilt. I wasn’t led astray or deceived. And most importantly (I cannot possible overstate how important of a distinction this is), what people could not understand is that it was not a choice to believe the church was false, it was merely a realization. It was no different than noticing a tree in your back yard you’d never noticed before, or realizing that Santa Clause is in fact made up. It wasn’t a choice to not believe, I simply could not believe. I didn’t experience a “falling away” because deciding the church wasn’t true wasn’t faith based or an emotional decision. It is the complete opposite experience one goes through when they decide the church is true. The choice to join is an emotional one, the choice to leave is completely rational.

Unfortunately, I didn’t handle the news all that well. I started taking out my anger on my wife after we had just had our second son a mere two months prior. I started exploring alcohol because I could, and because I needed to escape the prison I felt I was in due to all the restrictions I’d lived with my entire life. I came home late drunk one night while my wife was feeding the baby and she was horrified. I didn’t act as I should’ve and I fully realize this. However, despite my willingness to try and reconcile and show contrition, all of these events led to separation and ultimately divorce. Knowing what she believes, I am just a lost soul devoid of direction and stability that the church demands so heavily. I could no longer fill the role of Priesthood holder, role model, and faith leader in our home. We are ultimately better off being apart, but it tears me apart that I lost my truly best friend as a result.

I am doing better, personally speaking, than I ever have before in my life. I have more confidence in myself although it’s a work in progress, and I have such a better perspective on life without all the arbitrary rules and causes for shame and guilt. I've opened up many more relationships and have a much less judgmental view of people who are different than me. In fact, I didn't fully realize just how judgmental I was until leaving the church.

I am now an Atheist and am fully comfortable with this conclusion. It was sad realizing God does not exist and nothing continues on beyond this life, but more and more I am getting comfortable with the thought. After all, we die temporarily each night we go to bed and fall asleep. And now time has more meaning than it ever did before.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/10/2014 04:51PM by exldsdudeinslc.